As the newly elected President (although my term has not yet begun) I was sent as the Leeds College of Art deligate to the NUS conference in Brighton.
The event was gigantic, we queued for about 40 minutes for registration, in time for the start of the conference. Initally the conference seemed surreal, it was weird being sat in a hot room amongst around 800 deligates and observers in a stadium-sized theatre, voting on things that seemed abstract. I chose to avoid too much of the campaigning and based my decisions on the clarity of speeches. I was proud of the diversity present at the conference, a good range of every race, creed gender etc. It became obvious that the union is heavily left-wing, and a lot of disagreements seemed to be based around syntax. Voting was carried out by raising one's voting card, when votes were close each raised hand had to be systematically counted, which took around 10-20 minutes. Apparently there was a digital voting system trialed a while ago, and it resulted in a lot of technical issues.
I enjoyed the process, although I was astounded by the amount of rather vicious exchanges on twitter. As I was deligating on behalf of the Student's Union I updated the twitter a few times... which was a bit of a pandora's box as I realised there was a world of personal attacks and labelling going on beyond the already tense atmosphere in the conference. The amount of media spin and drama about presidential candidates and the eventually elected President was also bizzare to witness unfold live. I was attending a news story as it happened. Thrilling!
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